


Underneath the color red

by faceofstone



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Dreamscapes, Future Fic, Gen, Post-Canon, Road Trips, Symbolism, but also past fic! what year is this, character-typical orientalism, trick - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-12-31 20:43:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21151922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone
Summary: Windom told Dale about the dugpas. Dale tells Laura about the dugpas. Laura doesn't say much in this one, already knowing that projection is one hell of a drug. And while they don't talk about it, they both remember peeking under the curtains only to find themselves staring at a vast and starless expanse beyond. In the end there is nothing to say.





	Underneath the color red

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thebigbengal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebigbengal/gifts).

It's another all-night drive to nowhere. Town after town, highway after highway until time and distance lose meaning. Their whole world has shrunk to the space within the arcs of a rental car's headlights, all dark asphalt and road paint. The radio is broken. When words flow out of their throat, they come out heavy and full of static. All they fill the air with is ghosts.

"Have I told you of my encounter with the dugpas?" asks Cooper.

"The what?" asks back Laura, eager to break the silence, not quite sure this is the way to do it.

"Dugpas, Laura." He grows bold, there's an echo of an old story molding his words, it's an easy path to follow. "The dark magicians who are otherwise known as red caps, as Madame Helena Blavatsky describes them in her early theosophical writings. They are an old sect of monks who resisted the yellow-cap gelugpa reform of the fourteenth century - a deeply spiritual affair, the details of which, if I am to be completely honest, mostly elude me - and practice their drunken sorceries in the great monastery of Sakia-jong, deep in the heart of Tibet. Or… in Bhutan." He frowns, losing momentum, struggling to chase back that memory, that knowledge, the abstract idea of a geographical map, finding no help in Laura's distant gaze. "...sources differ. It is said... that they can imbue even common objects with their evil magnetism. It is a fearsome power to be sure. To hex pieces of cloth that they place on the mountain paths that lead to their monastery, so that incautious hikers will step upon them and be subject to a tremendous psychic shock, making them fall to their doom. The high path of knowledge and spirituality is indeed a treacherous one..."

"Oh, yes." She nods, slowly. It's a slow day. "I met those. Didn't think they were monks, though."

"What do you mean?"

"I met those. But I didn't think they were monks."

Cooper nods. Certainties like that, they go nowhere. One day he and Laura herself will find out what she meant by those words, if it was her memory, or his, or something they have not experienced yet, or they will not. Happens to the best of them.

Regardless, he has his tale to tell, a tale which, as he recalls, began when he appeared in the mountains, far, far away. "Laura, the mountains…" 

In his memory, which is coming back to him as would a dream, one moment he was not there, the next he was, dragged through the ether by invisible forces. Summoned, is, the word, through obscure magic rituals. The mountains! The stone was old and heavy under the melting snow, banded, folded upon itself in so many layers that traced their parallel lines along the sharp cut of the mountainside; the gray horizon stretched farther than he had ever seen. Cooper stood motionless on a flat, dark rock. The pale six o'clock sun was still high in the sky. Amidst that stillness, a crimson line snaked through the valley, slowly marching toward him. It was a procession of monks, chanting in unison as they walked, and they wore red robes and red hats, and he knew what they were, and he could not move, overtaken as he was by fear. One by one, as they came next to him, they grabbed his face and observed it, tracing their fingers along his hairline and down to his jaw as if to find some secret there, a crack, a fault line. He didn't know their faces and they knew his face and they judged him. He knew, as he knows now, that there were good monks far away, in the monastery which lay at the end of the valley, whose golden domes could be seen on the horizon where the two mountains met. He thought, in his terror, that if he could get away, he would be able to take refuge there and the good monks would look after him. He thought they would show him their truths. But he could not get away. One by one, they grabbed his face and observed him, and they let him go. _ Imperfect moon _, they said. Imperfect moon. There was no moon in the sky, but that is what they said, and then they left. The valley was empty again. He wanted to run to the safety of the monastery, but as the last monk passed him by, he was not in the mountains anymore. Whatever mystical force had taken hold of him had loosened its grip, or another power had grown stronger. He found himself back in his bed, relieved by the simple familiarity of the objects around him, and went on to get a good cup of coffee, a fact which is positioned as the moral of the story, and maybe it is, he concludes with an awkward smile.

And then: with the gravity of the plate collision that gave birth to the mountains, this moment shifts, morphs, stretches, grows tighter and more brittle.

They linger in their motel room. The desert fills the horizon outside their window; Laura feels that she has seen this place already, with its vast clouds above and constellations of cacti on the ground, and lived this life already, and heard this story already. So it goes, on and on, swirling in the clouds, already written in secret patterns on the ground. They are tired.

"Have I told you of my encounter with the dugpas?" asks Cooper.

"The what?" asks back Laura.

"Dugpas, Laura. That is a name for the darker parts of the self. There is, you see, a tendency in occultist writings to speak in metaphors for the struggle of the human soul, so a text may describe the depraved dealings of a dark sorcerer, but when push comes to shove, what they mean to show is that all men may fall prey to those fallacies. It has long been proven that symbolic images are a way for the human brain to grasp abstract concepts that would be much too difficult to be absorbed directly. And so the Path of the Shadow, or the Left-Hand Path as it is also known, is a dark discipline for the the so-called black magicians of the Occident, but their archetype applies to us all. In a way, it is said, it stands for the selfish choices made by our ego in every little event in our lives, when we move away from universal unity and toward separation."

"Story of our lives," Laura laughs. There is no answer Cooper could offer that would make them feel better, so he offers none. Story of their lives.

Her laughter fades and he has to keep telling his story, to make sense of it. In this particular story of his life, then, the curtains parted and the mountains appeared before him. 

"No, no, no, let me start again: I was standing in a small room, back then," he says, and they both know where that _ back then _ is, and that it still looms over them, trembling red in the corner of their eye, chevron reflections in a diner's toilet. It is them. But _back then_ they curtains and the chevron were all around them, they were a place, which usually affords a certain degree of separation from the self. Except all of a sudden the curtains came up to him, sneaking on the floor and rising up against him from all directions. His body was surrounded by heavy red velvet. He tried to fend off the attack, but he saw faces in the fabric's folds, sneering at him. What he had thought to be curtains were rows of men and women dressed in red vests and red caps, some of them old, some of them young, their faces were all harsh and marked by evil, and they were all him. 

This sea of red-clad people who were him swarmed to him and parted back, and instead of the room, the mountains laid before him. The mountains! The stone was old and heavy under the melting snow, banded, folded upon itself in so many layers that traced their parallel lines along the sharp cut of the mountainside; the gray horizon stretched farther than he had ever seen. Cooper stood motionless on a flat, dark rock, trembling, feeling naked against the open expanse of the valley. The pale six o'clock sun was still high in the sky. The figures in red had swarmed the ground. A doctor came forward - long face, gray hair, a veterinarian, a distant part of Dale Cooper but a part of him nonetheless - and visited him as he stood there, paralyzed by fear. Cooper knew that this sea of red was not all of him: there was a house far away at the end of the valley, whose roofs could be seen where the two mountains met, where all the good he had done waited for him, wearing different vests and different faces, to look after him and to show him the way.

"Ever had any luck running from yourself?" asks Laura, her interest piqued.

"Oh, they let me go." 

The doctor stitched him back up, shaking his head at the end of his exam. Instead of explaining himself, he fell atop him, unfolding like a piece of fabric, leaving behind only the echo of his words: _he shall bring others_. He was a curtain again, and so were the others, and Cooper was _back there_, back inside. He spent the rest of that day thinking about those faces, an instant and twenty-five years. But the curtains never showed them again. They were far away.

Once again the moment shifts. It cracks, splinters, gains new mass.

They walk, because a car will not lead them where they need to be. They have been walking for a long time. The day is cold for the season, the snow hasn't fully relented yet, but their jackets are warm and their boots well-worn. The slope is mild and they are not alone on the path, tourists and locals alike enjoying the pleasures of a sunny day.

A row of gaudy little flags planted on the edge of the path catches Dale's attention; he waves at Laura to wait for him and kneels down to check out the closest one. The fabric is smooth under his fingers. The ground is smooth under his knees and he falls off the path, down the cliff. The world goes dark. Eventually, he lands on a different path underneath, one they did not tread on their way up. Laura is following after him, balancing herself with her open arms as she steps on big, flat stones on the mountain's side. With one last hop, she is standing by his side, helping him back up with a steady hand. They look ahead, trying to find their bearings. 

The mountains beckon them. The mountains! It comes back to them, as would a dream, or they come back to it, or both at once when seen from an impossible perspective encompassing both ends of the story. The stone is old and heavy under the melting snow, banded, folded upon itself in so many layers that trace their parallel lines along the sharp cut of the mountainside; the gray horizon stretches farther than he has ever seen. Cooper stands motionless on a flat, dark rock, Laura by his side. The pale six o'clock sun is still high in the sky. 

There are people walking on the path above; some stop to look at them. There are rows of people on a path higher up still, and yet more on the other side. Wool hats all over, 'tis the season (although which season it is, they could not say); some of them are red. They stare, for a while. Then they walk away, carrying their red hats with them, struck by indifference, keeping their secrets, their vices, their miseries, spreading them into the world. This place does not care. They have fallen into a mirror of itself and see now with razor-sharp clarity the simplicity of it all under the tales and symbols. It is vast and terrifying.

"Have I... told you… about...?" Dale says, and they are among ghosts, and a cold fog covers his words.

"Tell me that story," says Laura with the same urgency in her voice. "How did you get out?"

"I…"

The valley ends somewhere up North, as all valleys do. But there is nothing at the end of the road, where the mountains meet. No-one has summoned them: no-one has the power to let them go. Evil exists. A desolate crossing place leads into the unknown.

"I don't think I ever did."


End file.
